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You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience
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Themes
The Nature of Shame
The essays in this anthology explore the relationship between shame and Black communities. Shame, a mechanism for white supremacy and self-hatred, pervades contemporary society. The shame enacted by white supremacy infiltrates people’s lives in intricate and damaging ways. Shame teaches people to disconnect from others, to run away from their identities, to ignore their health or mental illness, to devalue their worth, and to numb their pain. Confronting shame requires vulnerability, which can be difficult, especially for marginalized groups who have been forced into vulnerability throughout their lives. However, the collection of stories curated by Brené Brown and Tarana Burke champions the way vulnerability can help to liberate marginalized communities.
Yolo Akili Robinson explains that white supremacy correlates Blackness with shame. Deran Young asserts that Black people, and especially Black men, feel isolated from themselves and their communities because of this mechanism. However, the relationship between Black people and shame is complicated. While shame limits, oppresses, and destroys, it has also been used to offer protection to members of Black communities. In Black churches, for example, Lewis-Giggetts explains that shame is used to uphold oppressive systems that were originally designed to keep people safe. Religious restriction for young girls and premarital sex helped to curb teenage pregnancies that could seal a woman’s fate. Churches used shame to ensure the effectiveness of these doctrines.
The lie shame tells is that it is functional, and that it wants to protect people rather than harm them. In “Never Too Much,” Marc Lamont Hill explains that masculinity serves a purpose; by appearing masculine and ready to fight, Black men are less likely to be tested or forced into a confrontation. Sonya Renee Taylor revealed how shame protected her from dealing with painful and complex memories and realities. Kaia Naadira explains in their essay, “Filling Every Page with Joy,” that shame is something that people cling to because they see it as a friend, even when they recognize it as an enemy. Burke and Brown’s anthology is filled with stories of people who bought into the lie that shame served them. What was once a strategy for survival became a strategy for life.
Shame maintains the status quo, including the oppressive patriarchal and racist systems that oppress marginalized groups. Tanya Denise Fields explains that shame drove every choice she made since she was a child. Her body was both a source of shame, and the place where shame wreaked havoc. The title of her essay, “Dirty Business,” exemplifies how confronting shame is not always easy or pretty: “Rejecting shame is a messy and nasty affair. Dirty business. It requires some serious shadow work to unhinge yourself from the manifestation of hundreds of years of foolishness that shows up in every facet of your life” (29-30). It was only when Fields confronted shame by sharing her story on social media that she was able to release herself from it. This anthology shows the many ways that taking power away from shame is the first step toward resistance and healing.
Vulnerability as Resistance
In Brené Brown’s 2010 TED Talk, she explained that she wanted to understand shame and how it functioned, but she also wanted to understand how wholehearted people were able to confront and let go of shame. Her extensive qualitative research pointed to vulnerability as the answer. Brown defines vulnerability as emotional risk. For the authors of the essays in You Are Your Best Thing, vulnerability is the key to abandoning the shame that has been handed to Black communities through white supremacy.
Discussions around vulnerability can be difficult for many individuals who have experienced the trauma of social and political oppression. In these instances, vulnerability is forced. White supremacy creates structures in which Black people are put into danger and are compromised and this forced vulnerability creates a wariness that severs the individual from their emotions and needs. Shawn Ginwright draws a distinction between emotional vulnerability and structural vulnerability. The former is empowering, while the latter is indicative of hegemony and the domination of Black bodies. Intergenerational trauma passed down from enslaved ancestors often translates as a need to stay closed off. In many Black communities, vulnerability is more than emotional risk; it is physical and spiritual risk. In the past, speaking up about one’s mental illness, for example, may mean the difference between life and death. Avoidance of vulnerability and an adherence to shame was seen as a survival strategy.
Deran Young shows how many Black people feel that vulnerability is a waste of time and is selfish. They believe that emotional vulnerability leaves them exposed, and they challenge the idea that vulnerability will change anything. Burke highlights how her apprehension of vulnerability may look different than Brown’s, writing, “My lived experience told me that the entire idea and experience of vulnerability feels like a very dangerous place to play, an unsafe thing to even consider or think about as a Black person in this country” (xvii). In a society that continuously forces vulnerability on marginalized groups, choosing to be vulnerable can feel counterintuitive.
Hill and Laymon highlight how difficult vulnerability can be for Black men. White supremacy develops a narrative that Black men are dangerous. Deran Young explains that this message has become so internalized that even Black men look at one another with suspicion. The connection between white supremacy and the patriarchy infiltrates all aspects of society, and many Black men feel that they cannot and should not be vulnerable. Yolo Akili Robinson suggests that the prevalence of anti-gay bias among Black people is a manifestation of this racist and patriarchal messaging.
However, the writers in Brown and Burke’s anthology have a clear message: vulnerability is resistance. Choosing to be vulnerable is open defiance to a system that seeks to strip individuals of choice. Vulnerability is also a pathway to healing. It is not easy; vulnerability is hard, daily labor. When Tanya Denise Fields shared her stories of abuse and shame on social media, she made herself vulnerable. For the first time, she began to feel like she was reclaiming control over her life and how she viewed herself. By embracing vulnerability, Fields grew stronger. This process was not easy nor was it without challenges, but the rewards of vulnerability outweighed the hardships. Each essay shows how the writer reclaims their narrative through vulnerability.
The Trauma of Racism and White Supremacy
In her interview in the introduction of the work, Brené Brown explains, “The greatest casualty of trauma—including white supremacy, which is definitely a form of intergenerational systemic trauma—is that vulnerability becomes dangerous, risky, even life-threatening" (xvii-xviii). While the writers in the anthology grapple with shame and vulnerability, they are also grappling with racial trauma. White supremacy creates systems and enacts mechanisms that seek to oppress and exert control over people of color. The history of white supremacy creates intergenerational trauma that has myriad damaging results: the inability to acknowledge or treat mental illness, an adherence to patriarchal values, distrust of one’s ability to feel and experience joy, shame in one’s identity and appearance, the belief that one cannot and should not be vulnerable, suspicion of others in one’s community, and suspicion of oneself. The messages of white supremacy become internalized as shame.
Racial trauma affects people’s lives and psychologies in complex and damaging ways. Austin Channing Brown exhibits this idea in her essay, “This Joy I Have.” Channing Brown asserts that people of color experience foreboding joy more keenly than others, because their fear of tragedy is based on the reality of the Black American experience. Tanya Denise Fields shares in her essay, “Dirty Business,” that the shame she felt about her body and her experiences with domestic and sexual abuse was an inheritance, as she was born into a world that handed shame to Black infants. Lewis-Giggetts reveals how patriarchal values pervade many Black churches, creating a structure within which Black elders uphold racist and patriarchal ideologies. Marc Lamont Hill exposes the way white supremacy contributes to how Black men see themselves and others.
Societal attitudes supported by a foundation of white supremacy greatly affect how many Black individuals see themselves. Laymon explains in, “My Head is a Part of My Body and Other Notes on Crazy,” that the medical system in the United States undervalues, ignores, and gaslights Black patients. Laymon began to see himself through this same lens, ignoring mental illness for years because his doctors had. When Irene Antonia Diane Reece experienced symptoms of a tumor as a young girl, her experiences were written off as attention-seeking. Racial trauma means that everyone—including the individuals who experience pain and harm—diminishes the truth and realities of marginalized groups.
The essays curated by Brown and Burke advocate for vulnerability to resist racial trauma and to begin a process of healing. While this can feel counterintuitive in a society that seeks to inflict vulnerability on marginalized groups, Brown and Burke believe that vulnerability provides a path forward. Deran Young suggests that those who find it difficult to be vulnerable with others begin by being vulnerable with themselves. Instead of carrying forward the damaging elements of generations of racial trauma, looking back and claiming inherited wisdom is a way to resist internalized shame. Young describes the Ghanian word sankofa, which emphasizes looking back into history and taking knowledge forward. For Reece, Hill, Keah Brown, and many others in the anthology, childhood and ancestry offer insight into what it means to live without and with racial trauma and how to reclaim a shame-free personal narrative.
Empowerment Through Empathy
Empowerment through empathy is at the core of Tarana Burke’s work. When Burke developed the #MeToo Movement, she saw how the sharing of stories could help women reclaim their lives through empathy, and the power in understanding that others had experienced the same hurt and harm from patriarchal culture. Burke argues that systemic change cannot happen until everyone has “engaged with Black humanity” (xviii), which means listening to the stories of marginalized people and approaching with empathy. In the introduction of You Are Your Best Thing, Brown acknowledges that, until she read the essays in the anthology, she did not fully understand the concepts developed by theorist and educator bell hooks. In the will to change: men, masculinity, and love, hooks argues that lovelessness is the foundation of white supremacy and patriarchy and that love is the only way to break the cycles of these oppressive systems.
When Tanya Denise Fields shared her experiences with domestic violence and shame with others, she created space for other women to come forward about how shame had written their narratives and to reclaim their stories. Shawn Ginwright advocates for creating space for youth to engage with vulnerability, arguing that adults have a responsibility to consider what they are modeling for young people and whether they are allowing young people to be emotionally vulnerable. He promotes healing-centered engagement which emphasizes a collective process of healing. Lewis-Giggetts hints at this when she suggests that older members of Black communities can and should take the lead on embracing love and freedom. Both Ginwright and Lewis-Giggetts recognize that it is not enough for one person to embark on a process of healing alone. Ginwright explains that because young people experience trauma and harm as a part of a collective experience, healing must be a collective experience as well: “We know from research that healing is experienced collectively and shaped by shared identity” (103). Empathy is a collective effort that transforms lives.
The stories in You Are Your Best Thing are designed to be an example of empowerment through empathy Each essay reflects and builds off the others, telling Black readers that their experiences are valid and shared while demanding that white readers pay attention to these stories and to the damage caused by white supremacy. When Burke began engaging with Brown’s work, she saw a disconnect between what Brown was saying about shame and vulnerability and the reality of the shame caused by racial trauma. Burke wanted to bring Black people into an important conversation about how shame functions in their lives and how vulnerability could help them heal. The authors found a path forward by embracing vulnerability, and sharing their stories with others.
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